Meetup #181

Huge thanks to our guest speaker this week for walking us through producing the winning short.

We also announced our first regular monthly cinema screening night: 28.5, a Neukölln cinema, 19:00 to 20:00, 5€ or free if you’re the director, submissions 3-12 minutes.

The actual challenge numbers: 13 films screened to 120-plus viewers. One short, about male friendship and loneliness, shot in black-and-white with cat-and-dog character archetypes, won both the Audience and Jury awards. A separate short took the Social Media award.

The double-winning director gave us the full war story: shot black-and-white on purpose to mirror the protagonist’s binary thinking, used ChatGPT only to sanity-check whether the theme actually landed (not to write anything), then hit a lens-mount mismatch that needed an emergency adapter run, and the replacement adapter still couldn’t change aperture, so the whole shoot got locked to one fixed aperture. Lost the location the night before day two. Cut a planned scene, not because the budget said so but to protect the crew’s morale. Got a moving shot by literally riding the DOP in a bike trailer. Her takeaway, in her words: trust the process, don’t be afraid to cut scenes, and put crew experience first because that’s who comes back for your next film.

Write that last part down.